W³P Lives: 04/10/25

Thursday, April 10, 2025

Mainstream higher education is under attack from an overbearing government that uses authoritarian tactics to erode academic freedom and enact an ideological vendetta. This is the recent takeaway from an address given at Hamilton College by former president Barack Obama. In addressing recent investigations and defunding of America’s elite universities, Obama urged academia to stand for “academic freedom.” For some reason, Hamilton and Obama missed the years of higher education’s decay before Trump’s re-election.

In addressing the Hamilton crowd, Obama’s rhetoric framed academia’s current travails with the Trump administration and public distrust as a struggle of values. Obama stated:

We say we’re for equality, are we willing to fight for it? Are we going to risk something for it? We say that we’re for rule of law, are we going to stick to that when it’s tough not when it’s easy? We believe in freedom of speech; do we stand up for freedom of speech when the other person talking is saying stuff that infuriates us and is wrong and hurtful? Do we still believe in it?

For university students and for your generation I think that’s important because part of how we got confused around some of these issues is that those who claimed to be fighting on behalf of social justice and freedom of speech and equality, sometimes we didn’t observe it ourselves.

It is as if Obama neglected the rising anti-Semitism, the cancel mobs, and silencing of conservative professors, the endorsement of racism in the form of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” (DEI) and the mass indoctrination and indebting of students that all culminated in making American higher education reminiscent of Dante’s seventh circle of Hell. For both Hamilton College and President Obama, some questions need to be addressed.

Where were you in 2017 when students at Claremont-McKenna forcibly shut down an event featuring Heather MacDonald? Student protestors shouted “From Oakland to Greece, f**k the police.” Students smeared MacDonald as a “fascist” using “free speech” as a ploy.
Where were you in 2015 when students at Yale University berated Nicholas Christakis over failing to create a “safe space” and demanded his resignation over hysteria about Halloween costumes and allegations of “cultural appropriation?”
Where were you in 2023 when Stanford Law students heckled and canceled a speech by Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan from the U.S. Fifth Circuit of Appeals because students felt he “proudly threatened healthcare and basic rights for marginalized communities”? Where were you when Stanford’s own DEI administrator took the side of the hecklers?
Where were you in 2020 when the Chabad Center at the University of Delaware campus in Newark was burned down in an act of arson?
Where were you in 2022 when Roland G. Fryer, a black professor at Harvard University, was forcibly canceled because his research empirically flew in the face of the woke orthodox thinking that predominates on campus today?
Where were you in 2023 when the then-president of the University of Pennsylvania, Liz Magill, refused to answer before Congress the basic question of whether or not the calling for the genocide of Jews constituted a violation of “Penn’s rules or code of conduct?” Magill stated that such things were “context-dependent.”
Where were you in 2015 when University of Missouri communications professor Melissa Click tried to forcibly prevent a journalist from filming protests on campus? Where were you this year when the head of the English department at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, flipped over a table on camps that was hosted by the College Republicans?
Where were you for years as China established Confucius Institutes throughout American colleges and universities and Confucius Classrooms across the country’s K-12 system to promote the Chinese Communist Party?
Where has your concern been over the explosion of anti-Semitism across college campuses since the October 7th attack?
Where were you when Columbia University students forcibly detained and attacked Mario Torres, a college custodian, when they took over Hamilton Hall while calling for the destruction of Israel? Where were you when Columbia blocked one of its own Jewish professors, Shai Davidai, from entering campus?

Good professors ask good questions, and this is just a sample.

Obama is onto something when on the matter of free speech he stated, “sometimes we didn’t observe it ourselves.” No kidding, Mr. President. The only question that still lingers is why anyone who seeks wisdom or job training would want to attend American colleges or universities at all. Obama’s speech at Hamilton College exemplifies the hypocritical ideological self-aggrandizement that predominates in higher education today.

Cover designed by Jared Gould using image of Hamilton College by Bill Badzo on Flickr & image of President Obama by Kelly Kline on Flickr

Author

Ian Oxnevad
Ian Oxnevad is senior fellow of foreign affairs and security studies at the National Association of Scholars.

Smug Service Workers Have Better Learn to Dig Ditches

posted by Kurt Schlichter at Townhall

Here’s one of the things that nobody is thinking about, but everybody ought to be thinking about. We’ve got the Trump tariff policy happening, and by the time you read this, all sorts of stuff will have happened. Either the market will go to the bottom, set new records, just sort of sit there, or whatever. In any case, one argument for the tariffs is that they will bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States. The counterargument is, at least from some, that we don’t want those kinds of jobs back. We don’t want manufacturing. Manufacturing is dirty and boring and, well, haven’t you seen “Norma Rae”? America’s future, they tell us, is in services – mostly white-collar services, where people with a college education go do things in offices.

Now, I’m not against doing things in offices. I am a writer. I ran a law firm for 30 years. I was an Army officer with a master’s in PowerPoint. I know offices, and here’s my perspective – a lot of the jobs those service industry people are doing right now are going to go away, just like the steelworker and textile mill jobs went away. Why?

AI.

I’m not worried about Skynet taking over. AI is interesting but clunky. It will get better, but what it’s going to get better at doing is primarily stuff that doesn’t take a lot of discretionary and intuitive decision-making. Here’s the ugly fact – a huge part of what the service industry does does not take a lot of intellectual input. It’s really just processing information. And, of course, processing information is what AI is best at.

For instance, a lot of the service industry involves taking in information, sometimes in person, sometimes over the phone, sometimes online. Think of a DMV clerk. You go up, give him a name, present some documents, get handed a test, get directed to the driving test, come back, he snaps a picture, and you get handed your temporary driver’s license. Of course, this all takes over four hours, and you’re surrounded by hobos and losers. Well, almost nothing about that could not be done through automation. You could do much of it online at home, including the written test, then show up for a behind-the-wheel test with a human being – assuming we don’t automate that too – and then get your license, all without 400 overweight unionized government sloths going through the motions like molasses in January.

Automation will progress from doing the most basic to more complex tasks, replacing meat with circuits. We’re already seeing this in the fast-food industry. We’ve gone from seven or eight cash registers to two, of which only one is operating, plus a bunch of kiosks. That doesn’t even require AI, though soon AI will make it faster by detecting your phone when you walk in and asking unprompted, on a screen or through an electronic voice, “Hi Mr. Vindman, would you like your usual three Big Macs with extra Big Mac sauce, large fries, and a small Diet Coke?”

Now, for the more complicated white-collar service stuff, it is only a matter of time before AI makes millions of jobs obsolete. A massive amount of service industry activity involves collecting and collating information and putting it in a more simplified form so that someone up above them in the food chain can look at it quickly and make a decision. That’s what a memorandum is – a document that distills information so the boss can decide something. AI will soon do everything but decide on big issues.

Think about what other jobs could be automated. How about insurance claims and underwriting, both of which involve processing information, making low-level decisions directly, and providing information for higher-level decision-making by others? How about project managers? AI is certainly capable of setting deadlines and enforcing accountability. Of course, most of its subordinates will soon be AI as well. Remember how we were all supposed to learn to code? It turns out that AI is becoming a better coder than any human being.

Let’s take paralegals. Paralegals are not lawyers, but they do some of the tasks that lawyers can do that do not require direct legal reasoning, advising clients, or appearances in court. A paralegal will typically answer discovery, which is written questions and document requests sent by the other side. How does the paralegal do that? The paralegal looks through a file of information, collates data, and presents it in the appropriate form. In fact, lawyers do this, too, and big law firms used to hire lots of young attorneys on contracts to do document reviews for massive litigation.

You know where this is going. AI can sift through all that documentation – almost all law firms are paperless now, so it’s not even a matter of scanning in hundreds of banker’s boxes worth of hard documents – and figure out the answers to the discovery questions, collate the information, and present it in final form. Then a lawyer looks it over before signing off on it – just like the lawyer does with a paralegal’s work – but that’s it. That’s the human contribution. And that’s the end of hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Hell, AI is even undercutting the writing industry, especially the online variety. Most writers are just hacks who repurpose other people’s work into simplified versions that they pass off as their own. If you need to know the basic news, AI is going to do about as good or better than some communist Columbia journalism school graduate, and you can even program it not to be Marxist.

But can AI replace individual artists and writers? That is, can it have its own voice? I like to think I have my own unique voice. Let’s see how AI does writing about one of my favorite topics, the new rules and two-tier justice system (The specific request to Grok is: “In 200 words in the style of Townhall columnist Kurt Schlichter, describe Kurt’s opinions on the two-tier justice system and the new rules.”):

Kurt Schlichter, the no-nonsense Townhall columnist, would likely torch the two-tier justice system with his signature fiery swagger. He’d argue it’s a rigged game where elites—like Hillary with her email shenanigans or Hunter Biden with his laptop of debauchery—get a slap on the wrist, while regular Joes get crushed under the full weight of the law. Schlichter would say it’s not just unfair, it’s a deliberate middle finger to the little guy, proof the swamp’s corrupt to its core. He’d probably call out spineless RINOs too, whining they let the left weaponize the courts while conservatives clutch pearls instead of fighting back.

As for the new rules—say, some AI guidelines—he’d scoff at the cowardice. “Can’t decide who deserves the death penalty? Boo-hoo, grow a spine!” he’d growl, mocking the hand-wringing limits. He’d argue it’s another leash on truth-tellers, keeping us from calling out the real crooks. Schlichter would demand we ditch the kid gloves, let the system name names—elites or not—and stop coddling the guilty with “subjective” nonsense. To him, it’s all part of the same gutless establishment con, and he’d rally the red-blooded to smash it, not simper about it.

Well, a couple of impressions. First, I’m glad to see that Grok considers me amazingly based. It also accurately assesses my positions in general, but it’s really just a simulacrum of my style. It’s an echo, not a copy. Now, it’s better than about 90% of the junk out there, but I am better than about 99% of the junk out there. I don’t think AI has quite got me down, but for a lot of tasks, AI is going to do as well or better than human beings.

So, where does that leave America, and how does that relate to the tariffs? Well, the idea that America has passed the era when we needed to make things because now we can all live easy lives essentially shuffling papers is crazy. A huge percentage of those service workers who were on the rise after the Rust Belt started oxidizing are going to find their jobs just as endangered as the coal miners have.

Look, no one knows how Trump’s restructuring of the economy through tariffs is going to end up, but the critics of his policies – many of whom have an unbroken track record of failure on every single policy choice in the last 30 years – are living in a fantasy world if they imagine all of America is going to look like “Office Space” in the future. Instead of focusing only on the new TPS cover sheets, maybe we should figure out how to manufacture some flair.

On the Fringe, Red Pill News, and more- April 10

Europe Capitulates To Reality

posted by Allan J. Feifer at American Thinker

The European veil of leftist intellectual and moral superiority is starting to crumble. In recent weeks, we’ve seen Europe begin to take responsibility for its defense, the climate crazies seeing many of their goals collapsing under the weight of the twin realities of science and economics, and the rise of conservative politicians who are seeking an end to the immigration invasion. Zeitenwende in German means the end of an era or turning point in history. Europe’s possible return to sanity will be our story today.

Europe is now fully awake to the fact that the U.S. is not their on-call military, and they are now genuinely worried, not just performatively so, about Russia. European nations know now that they are, for all intents and purposes, at war, primarily armed with a checkbook and too little actual military hardware. Thanks to decades of cradle-to-grave benefits, in addition to their reliance on the U.S. for their defense, Europe essentially has no functional militaries.

As just one example of how this works, in 2014, when a hijacked aircraft was about to fly over Swiss territory, Switzerland was unable to police its own territory, relying instead on the French and Italians. In fact, when the French military called the Swiss to have them intercept the airliner, they got an answering service saying they were closed for the weekend and asking them to leave a message. That one anecdote explains so much more.

Another aberration: Germany, Denmark, and Sweden allow their soldiers to join labor unions! You can’t make this up. Reality Bites.

When it comes to funding their defense, EU countries have two fundamental problems: 1. They all have low birth rates within their established native populations. 2. Their ability to provide those cradle-to-the-grave benefits has meant that European nations do not have money for guns and butter. Today, Europe is a paper tiger unable to wage modern sustained warfare.

European nations are trying to change, but it may be too little, too late. Germany has approved a €1 trillion spending package, marking its most ambitious defense initiative since World War II. EU-wide efforts include the “ReArm Europe Plan,” which aims to mobilize €800 billion for defense by 2030. This plan focuses on enhancing military readiness and supporting the European defense industry. NATO nations have increased their defense budgets, with 23 out of 32 members meeting the alliance’s 2% GDP spending guideline by the end of 2024.

As another example of the European leftist mindset, one unanchored to reality, let’s talk about the grand pronouncement from government-subsidized Airbus and the EU that, by 2050, new aircraft would be required to be zero emission. To those knowledgeable about airplanes and their development, this was always nonsense. Aviation Week published as much in its Viewpoint editorial.

After Europe and the rest of the world have spent tens of billions of dollars/Euros on electric, hydrogen, and clean fuel initiatives such as SAF, the balloon is bursting with the realities of science and economics. Airbus is giving up on hydrogen, and several other electric/battery technology companies are declaring bankruptcy.

The reality is that less than 2% of aviation fuels are SAF today, and the cost is as much as 4-10 times more than the jet-A fuel it replaces. Europe, being Europe, doesn’t see a problem. Reduced to its essentials, the Europeans said, “We’ll tax tickets to subsidize SAF.”

French authorities have admitted this will cause a massive drop in passenger traffic. Tres bon! Fewer passengers mean fewer flights and planes and further the green crazies who want to see an end to taking trips by plane anyway. Predictably, this nonsense is reaching its natural point of failure. The Emperor is now standing naked in front of all.

Finally, although those in power are fighting viciously, the European people are moving from center-left to center-right, especially regarding immigration. The center-right victor in Germany’s recent elections, Friedrich Merz, promised a radical crackdown on migration during his campaign, proposing that all illegal aliens be turned away at the border. Jens Spahn, a German parliament member, emphasized the need to “secure Europe’s external borders“ and strengthen Frontex’s mandate to ensure freedom within the Schengen area.

Greece and Croatia have been accused of forcibly returning migrants, a practice known as “pushbacks.” The Poland-Belarus border reports highlight systemic pushbacks, with migrants being forcibly returned to Belarus under harsh conditions. This reflects Poland’s firm stance on controlling illegal crossings. Some European nations have introduced laws to expedite deportations and limit asylum applications, signaling a shift towards stricter immigration policies.

One last thing. Trump’s recent tariff moves have scared Europeans. With a trade imbalance of over $200 billion, Europe has little choice but to negotiate from a position of weakness. Europe is dependent on a lot of U.S. tech, banking, and military hardware—Europe’s inability to rise to challenges further cements America’s advantage.

Say what you will, but you can thank President Trump for getting Europe on the move!

You Gotta Admit That Trump Is Packing Some Major Cajones

posted by Kurt Schlichter at Townhall

Move over, “Big Balls.” That nickname rightfully belongs to President Donald J. Trump. He’s putting into practice the dictum of one of every real man’s favorite generals, George S. Patton: “Audacity, Audacity, Always Audacity” (to be fair, the pearl-handled butt-kicker may have lifted that bon mot from either Kaiser Wilhelm I or some Frenchman). Trump hasn’t panicked even as his bold plan to remake the economy using tariffs vapor-locked the Dow Jones. In fact, he savagely mocked the Panicans for their drawers-soiling sissiness as the stock market tumbled. And this is a guy with cause to panic – the worst-case scenario for you and me is that our 401(k)s shrink to the size of Robert Reich. If Trump loses, he ends up dead.

Literally. Remember, if a Republican doesn’t win in 2028, the lawfare is back on and squared. His enemies tried to bankrupt him with lawsuits that would’ve been laughed out of the courts had the defendant not been Donald J. Trump. His enemies tried to frame him and throw him in jail for the rest of his life. When that didn’t work, they tried to kill him. Twice. His enemies managed to blow his ear lobe off and murder an innocent man who got in the way. Then the next one tried to do it with a rifle only because he couldn’t come up with the Stinger missile he wanted to get from his Ukrainian buddies.

Talk about high stakes. But Trump doesn’t care. Move over, honey badger. President 47 is in the house, and no Schiffs are given.

It’s not just the tariff stuff where he’s going all in, and he is going all in. Look at his appointments. He put Pete Hegseth in at the Department of Defense. The military-industrial complex had a collective stroke at the thought of a real soldier running things instead of some Raytheon retread who would continue the strategy of decline, defeat, and DEI. Then he put Robert F Kennedy, Jr., in at HHS. This guy rejects everything that the failed pharma/public health collective is about. He couldn’t be more hated if he were a Jewish kid at Columbia. And Kash Patel and Dan Bongino at the FBI? Are you kidding me? The base is happier than J. Edgar Hoover on an Ann Taylor shopping spree.

Who have we ever seen be this aggressive, run these risks? No one, not even the great Ronald Reagan, who freaked out the entire DC establishment by fighting communism instead of submitting to it like the invertebrate serfs the squishes are. And Trump pulled it off. He got all those people confirmed. He took a whip to the Senate, which probably more than a few senators were into, and beat it into submission. Remember how during the confirmations a few pipsqueaks tried to get some attention by getting uppity? That lasted about five seconds. Trump squashed them like bugs.

When some judge 2,000 miles away from the proper venue demanded the President turn around a couple of planeloads of illegal alien terrorists, Trump dropped them off in El Salvador’s version of Supermax. Muy bueno! When the media howled because some loving father/honor student/future discoverer of the cure for cancer gets hooked up by Tom Holman‘s heroic sanitation engineers, Trump sends out his people to point out that the guy is a gang member, fentanyl dealer, or some other variety of scumbag. He doesn’t hesitate. He doesn’t fall for the scam. The okey-doke no longer works. Hey illegals, Trump doesn’t care where you go, and he doesn’t care who cries about it, but you can’t stay here.

Remember how Fredocons like James Lankford cravenly informed us that there was no way we could shut down the border without agreeing to Democrat dream legislation that would pretty much force the border open forever to every Third World psychopath who wanted to come in and rape, loot, and pillage our glorious country? Trump slammed the door shut in about 30 seconds. Now, it’s harder for an illegal alien to get into America than it is for a white, suburban, conservative CIS-male valedictorian to get into Harvard.

Speaking of communist conformist factories masquerading as universities, Trump has demonstrated the testicular fortitude to choke off their money. That’s all they really care about anyway – most are hedge funds with an attached campus. He’s also going after the money that funds the international left through its network of NGO troublemakers. Goodbye, USAID. Goodbye, diversity grants. Goodbye, funding for Ecuadorian transgender mime troupes. Hello, deregulation, gas leases, and the Gulf of America.

When soft Republicans cried about DOGE doing exactly what Republicans had always promised to do – cut government bulk, bloat, and baloney – he doubled down. He fought every bogus lawsuit the bad guys could bring and set the most fearsome predator the bureaucrats have ever faced upon them – a bunch of ruthless computer nerds with algorithms, attitude, and autism.

Internationally, he stuck with the Israelis and is allowing them to do what they should have done long ago – flush Hamas down the toilet of justice like the reeking floater it is. When the Houthis started playing horsey, he showed them how to play horsey. He mocked them by tweeting out a video of about 100 of them in a Houthi circle of onanism getting a one-way ticket to Virgin City thanks to a 2,000-pound Air Force JDAM – oh, the things you can do when your pilots are channeling Curtis LeMay instead of Ibram X. Kendi!

He told the Europeans they need to get their act together and to defend themselves as well as pay their fair share of NATO. He told that maple-leaf polar parasite to our north that Uncle Sucker was cutting it off. He looked at Greenland and Panama and reminded the world that imperialism is a glorious thing. In a move that scandalized the foreign policy establishment that believes that the purpose of America’s foreign policy establishment is to allow foreigners to disrespect us without consequence, Trump refused to let that Ukrainian dwarf disrespect him in the White House.

He has fired scores of woke generals, pinko prosecutors, crooked cops, and thousands upon thousands of useless bureaucrats. He has refused to obey the regime media message machine and fire allies such as Elon Musk, Mike Waltz, and Pete Hegseth. Sorry Elizabeth Warren, no scalps for you and your tribe.

Every one of these actions was high risk. Every one of these actions could have led to the collapse of support within his party or the approval polls. Trump could have played small ball, but he went big. He could’ve winked at his enemies and made a tacit agreement that if he does nothing and changes nothing, they’ll leave him and his family alone after he leaves office. But he didn’t. He’s gone all in.

So far, it’s paid off. He would’ve killed for his current approval numbers back during his first term. The rest of the Republican Party knows it, and even the softest Uniparty collaborators are afraid to cross him. He keeps piling up win upon win, and we don’t feel no ways tired of all the winning.

But we need to appreciate the risk our President is taking to Make America Great Again. Trump is risking everything. We know because they’ve already tried to kill him, twice, and about half of them think killing him would be a great idea. That means that for President Trump, this is literally a matter of life and death, and the most awesome and inspiring thing is that he just doesn’t care.

OK, “Big Balls,” you need to hand over that nickname. By all rights, it belongs to President Donald J. Trump.

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Milton Friedman's Warning to DOGE

The Nobel Prize-winning economist says the Iron Triangle of Politics must be defeated to cut down the government for good.

Zach Weissmueller for reason.com

"Wise words," wrote Elon Musk about this 1999 viral clip described as "Milton Friedman casually giving the blueprint for DOGE [the Department of Government Efficiency]" as he ticks off a list of federal government agencies he'd be comfortable eliminating.

Musk is right. Friedman, a Nobel Prize–winning libertarian economist, did offer a solid blueprint for creating a smaller, less intrusive government. At the peak of his fame, he seemed poised to influence an American president to finally slash the federal bureaucracy.

But those efforts ended in disappointment because they were blocked by what Friedman called the Iron Triangle of Politics.

Slashing government waste and making the federal bureaucracy more accountable are incredibly important. But President Donald Trump and Musk are hitting the same wall President Ronald Reagan did more than four decades ago.

Now more than ever, it's time to pay attention to Milton Friedman's advice for how to defeat the tyranny of the status quo.

In the 1980s, Friedman's influence reached deep into the halls of power.

"Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem," said President Reagan during his first inaugural address in January 1981.

Like Trump, Reagan was preceded in the White House by a big government liberal, who expanded the size of government and whose presidency was plagued by inflation.

Reagan, who awarded Friedman the Presidential Medal of Freedom, promised to enact many of the libertarian policy ideas laid out in the 1980 bestseller co-authored with his wife Rose.

"I don't think it's an exaggeration to call Milton Friedman's Free to Choose a survival kit for you, for our nation, and for freedom," Reagan said in an introduction to the television adaptation of Friedman's book.

But for the most part, the Reagan Revolution failed to deliver on its libertarian promises.

"Reagan's free market principles…clashed with…political reality…everywhere," wrote his former budget director David Stockman in his 1986 book The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed. "For the Reagan Revolution to add up," he wrote, all the people "lured" by politicians into milking social services "had to be cut off."

Reagan tried to keep his promises but, like most presidents, he was only partly successful.

Reagan lifted price controls on oil, cut taxes, and pushed for deregulation. But his commitment to these initiatives quickly fizzled. Federal spending exploded, and he even left trade quotas in place for the automotive industry.

The failure of the Reagan revolution inspired the Friedmans to write The Tyranny of the Status Quo, which examines the political obstacles that obstruct government cost cutting. Their insights are as relevant today as they were 41 years ago.

The book, which came out in 1984, pinpoints the Iron Triangle of Politics as the main obstacle to cutting government. The triangle's three points reinforce each other to uphold the status quo: the Beneficiaries, the Politicians, and the Bureaucrats.

The "beneficiaries" are interest groups and connected industries that profit off of government programs at the expense of taxpayers. Today's beneficiaries include farmers who receive federal dollars. The new budget bill backed by the Republican Party would extend the Farm Bill, which subsidizes crop purchases. As Friedman said, the people paying the bill are "dispersed." You might not have noticed your share of the $2.1 billiongoing to prop up corn, soybeans, wheat, and other prices when you paid your 2023 taxes, but the farmers who get that money certainly did.

The "politicians" depicted on the triangle are supposed to be responsive to their constituents but end up serving interest groups instead. But it's the bureaucrats who actually distribute the money.

They grow their power when politicians grow the size of their departments, which generates more spoils to distribute to the beneficiaries. It's a symbiotic relationship all at taxpayer expense.

Bureaucracy tends to "proceed by laws of its own," wrote Friedman, noting that in the half-century between Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal and the Reagan Revolution, the U.S. population "didn't quite double but federal government employees multiplied almost fivefold."

Musk has also observed that a metastasizing bureaucracy "proceeds by laws of its own," stating in a press conference from the Oval Office that "if the people cannot vote and have their will be decided by their elected representatives…then we don't live in a democracy, we live in a bureaucracy."

And, like Friedman, he senses danger if the ballooning of the bureaucratic state isn't reversed. At another press conference, he told attendees that "the overall goal here with the DOGE team is to help address the enormous deficit….If this continues, the country will become de facto bankrupt."

DOGE's strategy is to try breaking through the Iron Triangle by the force of a thousand cuts, looking for little inefficiencies with the mindset of a software engineer. Musk has described his role as "tech support," which is fairly accurate given that the Executive Order that created DOGE actually just rebranded an Obama-era agency called the U.S. Digital Service.

It's a good start. The federal work force should be streamlined, and much of it even automated. But Musk might be repeating some mistakes of the Reagan years.

As Stockman observed, the Reagan Revolution floundered because his team only focused on "easy solutions" like ferreting out "obscure tidbits of spending that could be excised without arousing massive political resistance," which" yielded savings that amounted to rounding errors in a trillion-dollar budget."

To make real progress on cutting spending, the cost reduction must go deeper than tech support could manage on its own. Friedman knew that the path to shrinking the federal government began with abolishing federal agencies. In his viral clip, he lists the departments of Housing and Urban Development, Agriculture, Commerce, and Education as ones to put on the chopping block.

Trump has already shut down the Department of Education…kind of. His executive order directs the Education secretary to draw up plans to eliminate or shift some spending to other departments. It keeps major spending like federal student loans intact, and a total dismantling will require Congress to act.

The Trump administration has made severe cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and it defunded the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the brainchild of Elizabeth Warren, which made access to credit and banking more difficult for low-income customers. DOGE also enticed 75,000 federal workers to resign. But many of these cost-cutting initiatives have been challenged in court. Truly eliminating federal agencies requires congressional action.

Because Trump holds only slim congressional majorities and didn't win on a platform to slash government, he won't be able to eliminate entire federal departments like Commerce or Agriculture.

But what would happen if the Trump administration had really followed the Friedman blueprint, learned from the shortcomings of the Reagan Revolution, and created a political movement capable of pressuring Congress to finally start permanently eliminating entire agencies?

Friedman says it would actually make the federal government function better by narrowly focusing on providing what state governments and the private sector can't.

"One function of government is to protect the country against foreign enemies—national defense," says Friedman. "A second function of government, and one which it performs very, very badly, is to protect the individual citizen against abuse and coercion by other citizens….I believe that the government performs that function very ineffectively because it's doing so many things that it has no business doing."

Earlier this year, Musk wielded a chainsaw gifted to him by Argentina's libertarian president, Javier Milei, who more closely followed the Friedman blueprint by targeting the beneficiaries and the bureaucracy, which he calls "La Casta."

In Argentina, it took massive poverty and triple-digit inflation to spark a real libertarian movement that now has a chance of overthrowing the tyranny of the status quo.

We don't want to wait for things to get that bad.

Musk praised Milei's approach at an event in Buenos Aires co-hosted by the libertarian Cato Institute.

"I think governments around the world should be actively deleting regulations, questioning whether departments should exist," said Musk. "Obviously President Milei seems to be doing a fantastic job on this front."

Fantastic indeed. But how can the Iron Triangle be overcome in the American system?

DOGE itself can't legally delete entire departments. DOGE's website claimed $140 billion in cuts out of its $2 trillion goal as of early April 2025.

But it hasn't provided full documentation, and various media and open source analyses have ball-parked DOGE's total savings as more in the $2 billion to $7 billion range.

Either way, DOGE isn't anywhere close to reaching its goal of cutting $2 trillion in government spending, or almost 30 percent of the $7 trillion annual budget. The Congressional Budget Office found the deficit grew 5 percent in February compared to the previous year despite DOGE's early cuts. Meanwhile, the Republican majority passed a budget projected that would add $3.4 trillion to our $28.8 trillion debt.

And we haven't even talked about Social Security and Medicare, which are the major drivers of debt, and which Trump has promised not to touch.

As Stockman came to realize, this is a bipartisan problem.

"There isn't a difference [between the parties] when it comes to the debt," he said on an episode of Reason's Just Asking Questions. "How in the world can we keep adding $1 trillion to our public debt every three months? How are we going to get away with basically enslaving the next generation of Americans with debt?"

The only way to break the Iron Triangle, Friedman suggested, is to push through deep structural reforms that are hard to overturn: a balanced budget amendment that forces Congress to spend responsibly, a line item veto allowing a president to eliminate special interest handouts without scrapping an otherwise popular law, a flat tax to eliminate special interest carve-outs, and a hard limit on how much money the government can print each year.

Sounds easy, right? Of course, it isn't.

Friedman believes that to defeat the Iron Triangle, a popular politician must break free of the grip of the triangle's other two points.

A new president, with a broad popular mandate and bully pulpit, is in a unique position to push the kind of radical but necessary reforms needed to cut government. And it all must happen, says Friedman, within the first six-month "honeymoon" period.

Trump entered his second term with a bold and disruptive plan, but he's spending his political capital unwinding America's global trade and defense partnerships, not on slashing spending.

To really cut the government, Friedman says you must capture the White House with a plan to cut spending and then make it harder to spend more. Trump isn't fighting that battle. He went to war with Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) for opposing the GOP's bloated budget.

And with Trump's tariffs throwing the market into turmoil, legal challenges to his executive action piling up, and his popularity already waning, the "honeymoon" is already over.

The gargantuan task of breaking the Iron Triangle will probably be left to whoever comes next. But the Iron Triangle will remain unbroken, and the looming threat of an increasingly centralized and bloated government will persist, until a movement emerges that is dedicated to achieving enduring structural reforms.

As Friedman wisely observed, it's not only short-term results that matter but the methods and their long-term consequences.

When asked what he'd do if made dictator for a day, Friedman replied, "I don't want to be made dictator. I don't believe in dictators. I believe we want to bring about change by agreement of the citizens. If we can't persuade the public that it's desirable to do these things, we have no right to impose it on them even if we had the power to do it."

DOGE's mission to rein in our catastrophic debt and unrestrained federal government is one of the most important political battles of our time. But it's a mission that will need more than a single executive agency to ultimately succeed: It needs a mass political movement.

If Only FTX Could Use the Fed’s Accounting

Douglas French for mises.org.

The Federal Reserve continues to lose money—$77.6 billion last year according to the Wall Street Journal. The previous year the nation’s central bank lost $114.3 billion. And, there is no end in sight. The Fed is paying 4.4 percent on $3.4 trillion in reserves while earning only 2.6 percent on its securities portfolio. This is a side effect of ZIRP.

Two years ago, Thomas L. Hogan wrote in The Hill, “The Fed is bankrupt.” As of January 6, the Fed’s “net worth” was negative $173.5 billion. Yet, the Fed paid out over $1 billion in dividends to its member banks last year. There was no mention of the central bank’s insolvency during last week’s Q&A with Fed Chair Jerome Powell.

Hogan explains, “What does the Fed do when its liabilities exceed its assets? It doesn’t go into legal bankruptcy like a private company would. Instead, it creates fictitious accounts on the assets side of its balance sheet, known as ‘deferred assets,’ to offset its increasing liabilities.” Imagine Sam Bankman-Fried—who sits in jail for the bankruptcy of FTX. Unless Bankman-Fried receives a pardon from the President, he is scheduled for a 25-year stay in jail on a fraud conviction. But, it appears FTX creditors will be made whole plus interest. Wired.com reported late last year,

In this case, though, the administrators of the FTX estate were able to recover billions of dollars by liquidating investments made by the exchange’s venture capital arm, FTX Ventures, and its sister company, Alameda Research, along with other assets. A rise in the price of cryptocurrencies in the period since FTX filed for bankruptcy, meanwhile, raised the value of the coins left in exchange coffers.
Under the plan, government bodies in the United States—including the Internal Revenue Service and the Commodities and Futures Trading Commission—have agreed to suspend high-value claims against FTX until creditors had been repaid (although the IRS will receive a $200 million upfront payment as part of the settlement).

Even FTX equity holders are expected to be repaid at least a portion of their investment.

Joel Khalili wrote,

FTX filed for bankruptcy in November 2022 after running out of funds to process customer withdrawals. Billions of dollars’ worth of FTX customer deposits were missing. The money, a jury later found, had been swept into a sibling company and spent on high-risk trading, venture bets, debt repayments, personal loans, political donations, luxury real estate, and other illegitimate dealings.
Despite the unadvised buying binge of bonds at tiny rates during COVID and general mismanagement of the central bank’s balance sheet, Jay Powell doesn’t have to worry that he will end up in the same jackpot as Bankman-Fried. He’s able to use, as Jim Grant calls it, “DIY accounting,” to create deferred assets to accumulate losses until the Fed’s fortunes turn around.

“They are getting closer and closer to break-even as time goes by,” as Seth Carpenter—chief global economist at Morgan Stanley and who previously worked at the Fed and the Treasury—told the WSJ. “It’s difficult for me to see a scenario where they don’t get back to making a net profit, but it could take a couple of years.”

That’s all any entity that goes bankrupt wants…a couple more years.